


122

by justkatherinetheokay



Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: Everyone is Dead, Except Lalli, Gen, Lalli being a hermit in the woods, M/M, Mages, My First Work in This Fandom, Old Man Lalli, Post-Canon, Spirits, et cetera - Freeform, not that there's much canon to work with yet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-30
Updated: 2015-08-30
Packaged: 2018-04-18 01:48:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4687826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justkatherinetheokay/pseuds/justkatherinetheokay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the one life that’s actually happening now, there are no kids, and within twenty years or so there will probably be no more Hotakainens. There is just Lalli, hair starting to whiten around the roots these days, and a girl not related to any of them who came out of the Silent World speaking Finnish, somehow with neither immunity nor rash.</p>
            </blockquote>





	122

**Author's Note:**

> What this is I don't even know. It just sort of... came about. (I definitely didn't write it for the sole purpose of working in that ironic/tragic echo, oh no, not a bit.) For whatever reason when I'm not writing AUs I'm always writing about stuff completely outside the timeline of whatever canon. It's been a while since I posted anything, I know, and I also know this isn't exactly my usual... but yeah. Here is my first shot at the Stand Still, Stay Silent universe and characters, which I absolutely adore. (It's labeled Major Character Death only because almost everyone is dead before the beginning.) I hope people like it!

Tuuri would have been a good mother, given the chance. She had the disposition, the ability to deal with people, and she would have made sure her children grew up with at least some education—not like Lalli, who couldn’t tell a horse from a weird ugly moose. Once. 

Onni would have taught those kids, probably, since he’d never have had his own—no way he’d have sought to bring some helpless, most likely not immune little human into a world he so feared. But Tuuri liked children (in general—the Vasterstrom brats and their possibly-familial incomprehension of personal space and etiquette notwithstanding), as rarely as they saw them back in Keuruu, and she didn’t pay much heed to immunity or lack thereof. That was kind of the problem, wasn’t it? But if she’d had time, she probably would have had kids. Someday. Little ash-blond second cousins who saw spirits, walked with them in dreams, could speak to them in as many languages as they needed. Onni could train them; Lalli could be alone in the woods, alone and content. Those could have been their lives. They might have been nice ones. 

In the one life that’s actually happening now, there are no kids, and within twenty years or so there will probably be no more Hotakainens. There is just Lalli, hair starting to whiten around the roots these days, and a girl not related to any of them who came out of the Silent World speaking Finnish, somehow with neither immunity nor rash. 

No one would take her when they finally let her out of quarantine, and he meant to pass quietly included in their number until, finding no active resistance at his doorstep, the stray insinuated herself into his custody. The fact that she could do that proved she was a mage, and a foreign one at that, despite all linguistic evidence to the contrary: he put up the wards to keep out the sort of accidental contact he once had an unintentional and (usually) unwelcome gift for attracting, and she walked right through them. Nor did anyone else have experience dealing with the foreign mages who could do that sort of thing. Besides, he was immune, so the risk wouldn’t have mattered even if it were great, and she apparently learned to cook somewhere out there—(he never asked; it didn’t seem important)—which was a practical use enough to make letting her stick around worth the annoyance. It still is. So here they are. 

Somewhere in the back of his mind he is always watching, waiting for the day she starts to show signs of falling apart into something less a _she_ than an _it._ It hasn’t happened yet, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t still, always, a slight chance that it could. Lalli just hopes that day never comes: he’s seen it before, and never wants to again. 

Normally her disposition reminds him a little too much (though perhaps in this case any would be too much) of Sigrun, so quiet, though welcome, is also a cause for concern. As they walk through the woods her boots make more sound than her mouth, today just as tacit as he always is. 

His own boots make no sound. They never have. 

She showed up late in autumn just after the first of the snow began to fall. Since then training has been sporadic, and she has made little progress. What she has achieved Lalli suspects is more a product of intuition or dumb luck than any newly-acquired skills. He was a reticent student himself, in different ways; he is a reticent teacher now. Easy progress is not encouraged by either of their dispositions, and together their dysfunctions not only combine but multiply. 

It’s spring now, the snow still icy on the bed of pine needles underfoot, not quite warm enough yet to melt. Tuuri told him once that the Old World had been warming from the way the people in it lived, and the snow was coming less and less frequently every year. The end seemed nigh one way or another well before it eventually came. There were some, then, who saw the rash sickness as the earth’s way of defending itself: turning humans more literally into the plague they had figuratively become. Lalli had thought it was one of her jokes and laughed, to her usual shrug of confusion and moving on. Now he thinks back to it sometimes, remembering the idea but never dwelling on it. What does it matter a thing’s origins, next to what the thing is now? 

Finally, a little begrudgingly, he breaks the silence. 

“Are you all right?” 

“What? Fine,” the girl says quickly. As they move along the path deeper into the woods she stays quiet again, except for the occasional yawn. Lalli frowns. 

“Did you sleep?” 

For a while, after, he slept whenever he could, waking for only a few hours a day to eat and relieve himself and make sure his surroundings were still secure. In his dreams he hunted it all across the otherworld, chasing and chasing, until one night he slipped and fell into the infinite waters once more, this time (he thought, at first) never to emerge. 

He never goes to the otherworld now; the silence is too heavy. 

“Yes,” she says. “Not all at once, though. I woke up a lot.” 

“Did you dream?” Lalli asks, curious. The girl frowns. 

“I don’t know.” The frown stays for a minute, her eyes faraway and thoughtful. Then she shrugs, and the shadow passes from her face. “If so, I don’t remember.” 

A few more minutes’ hike and they reach the clearing that surrounds the crystalline pool, a blessing of the gods where no beast ever ventures. The girl walks straight in, apparently unbothered by the cold. It’s a gift Lalli has often envied: even through his thermal layers and tight leather boots he still feels it, and every time it takes him a moment before he can bring himself to step down from the bank. By the time he’s standing there, ankle-deep and trying not to shiver, she’s already floating, serene, eyes wide as she gazes up into the sky, long braid already waterlogged and drifting through the pool beneath her. 

“Concentrate,” he tells her. “Sense the spirits around you.” She nods, and closes her eyes. He watches her drift off before he sits down on the bank and puts his attention elsewhere. 

The girl dreams, and Lalli keeps watch. If he senses her in trouble he can always go in to pull her out—but it’s never happened yet, though admittedly he’s not sure whether that means that she’s very lucky or just that she never leaves the safety of her area in the otherworld. Like Onni would do. 

Either way, someone needs to stay and stand guard here. Just because no beast has ever come near the pool doesn’t mean none ever will. 

  


“Who trained you?” the girl asks unexpectedly one evening. Lalli, mostly-asleep at the rickety table still strewn with dishes from dinner, opens an eye. 

“Mrh?” 

“Who trained you?” the girl repeats, sitting up straighter where she rests against the side of the blazing hearth, a book of foreign runes open in her lap. “You know, who taught you the things you’ve been teaching me?” 

“My cousin.” He closes the eye again. 

“Who was your cousin?” she asks then. 

“Onni.” 

“What was he like?” she persists, and this time Lalli actually opens both eyes and sits up, yawning and stretching his hands out in front of his thin chest. 

“Fearful,” he says after a moment. 

“Fearful?” she repeats. “Why?” 

“He feared the silent world,” says Lalli. “He didn’t want what happened to our family to happen to us, so he didn’t want us to go outside the walls.” With good reason, as it turned out, though he doesn’t say that. 

“The walls of where?” the girl asks. Lalli sighs and braces himself. 

“Keuruu.” 

“Did you grow up there?” 

“Mostly.” 

“Who’s _us_? Who else was with you?” 

“T-Tuuri.” His tongue stumbles over her name a little. It’s the first time he’s said it out loud in years. “My other cousin. His sister.” 

“So did you go outside the walls?” 

“Yes.” 

“Where did you go?” 

“The Silent World,” says Lalli dryly. The girl looks unperturbed. 

“What was it like?” 

“You came out of the Silent World,” he points out. “You tell me.” At that she goes quiet for a blessed minute. 

“Why did you go?” she finally asks, quieter. 

“There was a mission,” says Lalli. “We went to explore and collect books.” 

“Just you and Tuuri?” 

“No.” 

“Who else was with you?” She cocks her head to one side, and the name that springs to his mind first of the four truly gets stuck on his tongue. He’s not sure he ever said it out loud then; in truth there were days he barely talked at all, then. If he tried to say it now he might say it wrong, fumble it around the impassable language barrier that had stood between them from the start, so he just can’t. Rather than try at all he asks, 

“Why do you want to know?” The girl shrugs. 

“I don’t know,” she says. “I’m just curious. You’re old, so you must have some stories, and it’s kind of boring here.” At least she’s honest, Lalli thinks. That much they share, right down to the resulting lack of tact. 

“You could go into the village if you’re bored,” he says. The young mage shakes her head. 

“No, they don’t want me there.” She looks down. “They all think I’m going to turn into a monster.” 

“Maybe you are,” he says, and she looks up again, eyes wide. 

“Do you think so too?” 

“You haven’t yet,” says Lalli, and doesn’t glance up at the rifle that hangs over the fireplace, presently just a meter above her head. _This was made to kill monsters,_ his father had told him when he was little, when the fireplace it hung over was the cozy one in Saimaa. _So it will always protect you from them._ It’s the only clear memory he has of his father now; he thinks he had others, once, but they’re long since lost to time and agony and his mind growing old. Saimaa was forever ago now. It was forever ago even then, back before he realized that the rifle wouldn’t always protect everyone else. 

There was gunfire, he thinks, but he was never sure just what he heard: it was swallowed too quickly by the explosion. He’s never been quite certain of the order of events, of everything that happened. The way it happened didn’t really matter, after all; it was the result that matters, that’s stuck with him. 

The only part he does remember clearly is falling into smoke and waking up drowning, faint dreamy starlight fading through the growing expanse of water between him and his raft, hands reaching for nothing as he was pulled ever deeper by bony tentacles wrapped around his ankles. That might have been it if Reynir, in the vision or in reality or possibly somehow both, hadn’t reached in after him and pulled harder. 

Sometimes he wonders what might have happened if that day had gone differently. If any day of the many had gone differently. He never lets himself walk that path for too long, because in the end the fact remains that the days went exactly as they did, and there’s no changing it. He is alone, remote, with only a grudging trainee for company. Solitude has always been his preference, it’s true, and so it remains, and perhaps would have still; on the other hand, if that day had gone differently… but it didn’t. This is what is, this house, this life. No use dwelling on what might have been. 

That time—they—brought back the kitten, Tuuri had told him Mikkel said they couldn’t name it, because it still might die. In a similar vein, Lalli has never asked the girl her name. She is just _the girl_. Nor, it occurs to him now, has she ever asked his; nor does he recall ever offering it. The more he thinks about it, though, the more he can’t shake the feeling that, regardless, somehow, she still knows it. 

The questioning continues the next day, and the day after that, and gradually Lalli comes to terms with the idea that it actually may never go away again. Maybe if he gave longer answers, deeper answers, answers more than a word or two long, she would let up; but that wouldn’t be like him. He’s not sure he could find the words. 

Tuuri would probably say it’s better to talk about hard things than to not talk about them, but that was Tuuri, and she’s not here. So they continue. She asks, he answers, she asks some more, he deflects. 

“Did you ever fall in love?” Honestly he probably should have anticipated this question might come up eventually, but considering he spends these days paying her interrogation as little heed as possible, it hits him unexpectedly, instead, like a frozen stone to the stomach. 

“Maybe,” he says after a moment, because he isn’t sure quite how to respond at first. It seems right, though, once he’s said it. Maybe he did. He’s never been certain. There was never time to be certain. 

“Kind of,” he adds, because there was never time to be certain, but there was always something to wonder about. Maybe. Maybe he kind of fell in love. He’s never been sure what falling in love was supposed to feel like, because he was never certain—but whatever it is, he thinks that was kind of it. 

“Once,” he says, coloring his tone with finality so that with that, the conversation can be over. 

  


They come to the pool on the first day of spring and head for their usual positions, but before she lies down on the water’s glittering surface, rippling where their feet break it, the girl turns back uncertainly, hesitating. She never hesitates. 

“Will you come with me?” she asks. Lalli blinks. 

“Why?” he asks, rather than just say _no_ as was his first impulse. He’s been doing that more, lately—curbing his impulses. Taking the time for second thoughts. He must really be getting old. 

“You always send me there alone,” the girl says. “But you can’t teach me anything if you aren’t there, and I think by now I’ve learned about all there is in there that I can teach myself.” Lalli has to admit she had a point. But it’s been so long— 

“Fine,” he agrees, and, a little bit of water at a time, follows her deeper into the pool. Once it reaches waist-height (past even the tops of his boots—he hopes it doesn’t soak through his clothes—) he lets himself fall back, his legs rising up to rest on the water as it somehow carries his weight. Lalli has never understood water, even when it surrounded him. Tuuri probably tried to explain it once, but he didn’t listen. He never listened. 

The girl floats beside him. Their bodies may be close in the physical world, but he knows distance is different in the otherworld—still, he can sense her spirit. Probably. 

They’ll find each other. He hopes. 

Drifting away takes just a few moments, and the stars shimmer in colored sheets of light all around him, and he is back lying on his little wooden platforms just as he always was. They have fallen into disrepair, but not so badly that he can’t stand on them without falling. Lalli may be old, but he’s never lost his balance. 

He looks around and sees her instantly, standing just outside the edge of his area. She taps on the wall, he knows more out of manners than any practical reason—she walked through the wards on the house, and she could walk right through these too. Now he beckons, and she does. 

“Finally,” she says as she skips up close to him, and she smiles. As she does it’s like she expands, blurry half-formed faces fanning out around her, arms growing arms, new torsos sprouting from hers. 

Lalli panics. 

Of course it happens now. She—it—probably brought him here on purpose, just for this. This will be a beast far more cunning than most. It already is. The pool must not be blessed anymore, if she walked right into it. The village is doomed. More immediately, _he_ is doomed. 

He reaches for his monster-killing rifle, but it’s not there, and wasn’t that the problem all along? When he goes for his belt-knife it’s not there either. None of it is there. This is the otherworld, and all he has is magic he’s half-forgotten how to use. And the world seems to be spinning around him. 

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” says a slightly panicked voice from somewhere behind him, though with the world spinning and his eyes screwed shut Lalli isn’t entirely sure which way is behind and where is up or down. “Calm down, calm down. It’s okay, Lalli, it’s just us. Calm down.” The world stops spinning. Lalli freezes where he stands. He knows that voice. He’s never forgotten it; as long as he lives, he never will. Even if he never knew exactly what it was saying. Before. 

“I told you not to sneak up on him like this!” says another voice he still remembers like it was yesterday. “I told you he wouldn’t like it.” 

“What were we supposed to do?” says a gruff, dry voice. He never understood that one either. He understands them all perfectly now. “Would _you_ have believed us?” 

“—Well, maybe not,” she admits. Lalli doesn’t dare open his eyes. It’s a trick. It’s tricking him. This isn’t real. 

“Well—um—I mean—” that’s the one most recent in his memory, the last one of the five he ever heard and understood. Here, in fact. “It seems to have worked? So that’s good, right? We did okay, at least. Right?” 

“We did _awesome_ ,” says the final voice firmly, confidently. 

“Lalli,” says Tuuri gently, and he feels her small, soft hands clasp his. He opens his eyes. 

Maybe it isn’t a trick, though he doesn’t dare relax all the way. Not yet. They all stand there before him, their faces a variety of expressions. Mikkel looks bored; Sigrun looks impatient; Reynir looks excited, bouncing up and down on his toes; Emil looks wary, still, and like he doesn’t really know how to look at him. Tuuri waits until he meets her eyes, brimming with tears—happy ones, he’s fairly certain—before she flings her arms around his neck. Lalli stays very still at first, on the off-chance she’s a monster, but she makes no move to bite, throttle, or otherwise harm him, so after a moment he follows what little muscle memory remains for this to hug back awkwardly. 

“It’s really you?” he asks. She nods into his shoulder, sniffling a little. 

“It’s really me. Well—us.” When Tuuri pulls back she gestures around at the comrades behind her. 

“How?” 

“You’d have to ask Reynir.” She steps aside, to the edge of his sightline, so he can regard them all. They are all so _young_ , is what he can only seem to think—even Mikkel and Sigrun, the elders of the crew at the time, look much younger, frozen in death, than Lalli is now. Thirty-two years it’s been, thirty-two years he’s been alone. 

He doesn’t ask aloud, just looks expectantly at the foreign mage. He doesn’t look _as_ young; he had still been alive the last time Lalli had seen him, after all (though technically that was true of _anyone_ ), more recently than the rest. He isn’t really sure how long it’s been since he last saw most of them, Tuuri and Emil excluded (those he knows to the day, or used to). Time has gotten blurrier the longer it’s gone on. 

And how it has. It’s not exactly a new state for him, but gods, Lalli is _exhausted._

“Well,” Reynir says now, “I knew mages were supposed to help the spirits of the dead get to the afterlife. Right? But first, well, you have to find them. So… I found them.” He gestures around at the assembled company. “But I don’t know how to get to the afterlife. But I thought maybe you would, cause, you have real training and stuff. So I brought them to you.” 

“You’re not dead?” Lalli asks. Reynir frowns, and somehow his eyes simultaneously go wide. 

“Dead? Me? I don’t think so.” He looks at Tuuri. “Am I dead?” 

“I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t think so?” 

“Where did the girl come from?” Lalli asks, ignoring them. It doesn’t really matter whether Reynir is dead or alive, not now that he’s succeeded in his self-imposed task. “What happened to her?” 

“She was just a form I made to keep us all together,” Reynir explains quickly. “She kind of looked like everyone combined, right?” She did, now Lalli looks at them all separately—her nose was Tuuri’s, her eyes Mikkel’s, her hair Emil’s only at Reynir’s length, and like Sigrun she had towered over him. Three decades later, foreign mages are still _weird._

“I see.” 

“Thanks for the magic lessons?” Reynir grins sheepishly. Lalli looks at him flatly, and the grin fades some. “Okay. Yeah. Um.” Reynir looks around, then back at Lalli, hopeful. “So! How do we get to the afterlife?” Lalli shrugs. 

“I don’t know,” he says. Reynir’s face falls. The others look at each other. 

“You don’t?” Tuuri asks. “Onni did. I think.” 

“He did,” Lalli confirms. “So did I, once. But it’s been a really long time since I’ve come to this world at all, and I don’t remember my way around, and things might have changed.” 

“That’s okay,” Tuuri says quickly. “I bet if we all work together we can find the way. Right?” Lalli opens his mouth to respond, but has nothing to say and closes it again. 

“Just like old times,” says Emil. His smile is slight, but it’s blinding. Lalli finds himself nodding before he even decides to agree. 

“Yes! Another adventure!” Sigrun actually thrusts her fist up toward the glimmering starry atmosphere that surrounds them. Mikkel harrumphs. 

“Okay,” says Lalli. “Let’s… Yeah. Maybe that will work.” 

“Regardless,” says Tuuri, “at least we get to see each other again.” She used to be the older one, he thinks—she watched out for him when Onni didn’t. Now he is older, so much older than she ever was. 

“Yeah,” is all he says. 

“So where do we start?” Reynir asks. Lalli shrugs. 

“I guess we’ll have to just start walking and hope it’s in the right direction,” he says. The night scout stirs within him, and he actually smiles a little. “It will be eventually.” 

“Then let’s go!” says Sigrun firmly, and begins to march off along the bridge of floating, broken-down planks toward the edge of Lalli’s area. The rest all look at each other for just a moment before they fall into step behind her. Lalli walks ahead, jogging a little to catch up with Sigrun’s long strides so he can do his job properly. He has always done his job properly, when he’s had one; all his life, it’s been the only thing he’s had to do. All he’s had, period. All his life he’s been alone, except for the few times long ago when he wasn’t. If only Onni were here, and his parents—then the group would be complete in comprising all the people Lalli could ever want to fill the emptiness he only ever noticed had existed once they were there to replace it. 

A presence draws up just behind him, and he glances back to find that Emil has drawn up to walk with him. There are so many things they could say here, now, when at last they could understand each other perfectly, but they don’t, yet. In the brief time they knew each other they grew so used to communicating in looks and gestures, Lalli thinks, that to talk would feel wrong somehow. Rather than say anything, Emil gives him a wide-eyed, questioning look, and Lalli remembers the things the girl had asked; rather than say anything, he reaches out and grabs for Emil’s hand, lacing their fingers together and holding on tight. Emil’s thick, warm fingers squeeze Lalli’s slim ones gently as if to say he understands. There will be time for spoken words later, Lalli thinks—more time than he ever expected to get. 

They reach the border, and everyone pauses a moment to look out into the starry otherworld, gleaming with stars where it’s not blazing with sheets of blue-green light. Lalli reaches out with his free hand and touches the barriers that protect his space: they flicker silvery-blue, then fade from existence. No matter what happens from here on out, he won’t be needing them again. 

At a short word from Lalli, Reynir skips ahead to forge a path the rest can walk over the waters, and the companions who first ventured into the Silent World together decades ago follow, starting off on their very last journey, an adventure anew.


End file.
